Abstract: These days, the size of the Internet market, the use of parcels increases every year. Currently, in local delivery centers, the sorting of parcels has been processed manually. The manual process requires much time and high cost. Also it causes occupational injury and musculoskeletal diseases. Therefore it is necessary that the current method should be replaced with automatic smart robot manipulators. In this paper, we propose a robot control system with a context aware mechanism for generating information to control the movement of a robot, which automatically sorts parcels. The context aware mechanism generates intelligent information to control a robot using context data such as the parcel shape, weight, location and barcodes. Our robot control system collects context data of the parcel and carries out the reasoning of robot control data to pick up and drop parcels according to contexts. It also generates optimal delivery path using GIS engine. Then a robot manipulator, which receives control data of picking-up and dropping, processes the automated sorting of parcels according to delivery persons and delivery routes. It will be useful to save much time and cost by automating the parcel delivery sorting process, thus reducing frequency of industrial accidents.

These days, the number of people using e-commerce and the mobile Internet increases rapidly. Therefore, the quantity of delivery logistics increases accordingly every year. The parcel sorting operation in the current logistics industry is carried out mechanically using an automated sorter installed at a large distribution center [1]. However, the sorting process, which classifies parcels according to delivery orders, is manually done by deliverers working at local delivery centers such as local post offices. The parcel delivery sorting operation consists of two steps. This first step is the initial sorting, where arrived parcels are sorted according to deliverers. The second step involves sorting the parcels according to the delivery order.

The two steps mean that the parcels are sorted within each delivery person’s assigned area. Due to the volume and weight of parcels, the issues of excessive labor and industrial accidents can arise.

A robot manipulator can be applied to those working conditions to automate parcel sorting. Robot manipulators are widely used to efficiently conduct products distribution in many other industries such as automobile and electronic industries [4]. Generally a robot manipulator only conducts the same operation repeatedly [2]. It usually operates a process, which is a pre-programmed process according to standard size of products [3]. However, we cannot use the existing robot manipulator for automated parcel sorting because parcels have various shapes and different sizes. The use of context is important in interactive applications [5].

A new robot manipulator, which is able to recognize information concerning the different size and weight of parcels, is needed in the delivery logistics industry [9].

We proposed context aware model to automate parcel sorting in delivery logistics in our previous work [9]. Here, we design and implement a robot control system, which creates ‘pickup and drop’ control information in order to control the robot operation for each parcel and figures out optimal shortest path for delivery. After it receives parcel information such as theshapes of parcels or transport information from the sensors, it generates control information and sends it to a robot manipulator to carry out parcel sorting according to deliverymen and delivery routes. To do so, it is necessary to develop a robot control system consisted with a context aware system and a sorting plan system with GIS engine regarding parcels accordingly.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the process of the automatic parcel sorting and Section 3 describes in detail the implementation of the proposed robot control system. Section 4 explains how the proposed system works and Section 5 contains a brief conclusion.